The CIA has a better understanding of North Korea's efforts to develop nuclear missiles that can reliably hit targets in the United States, the agency's director said today, but is still working to make up for what he described as insufficient attention to the country under previous administrations.
"We're in a much better place today than we were 12 months ago," Mike Pompeo said in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on his first anniversary as the spy agency chief. "We are still suffering from having gaps."
Pompeo was careful not to assign blame to the agency he now leads and acknowledged that obtaining accurate and reliable information from inside North Korea has been difficult for many years. But he said previous efforts had fallen short of the goals the Trump Administration has set for preventing the country from developing nuclear weapons that can strike inside the United States.
Pompeo said that Pyongyang was a few months away from being able to build intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reliably strike US targets, an assessment he has previously given.
"They have moved at a very rapid clip," he said, noting that the frequency and success of missile tests had increased.